Lew's AUTHOR BLOG

Chaim Nahman Bialik

I extracted several lines from one of C. N. Bialik’s poems, written in the early 1900s, that beautifully express the feelings of the young Polish girl who is one of the two major fictional characters in my novel-in-progress …

Distant islands, lofty worlds
of our dreams,
they made us into strangers
wherever we went.
They made our lives hell.

Golden islands we thirsted for
as for a homeland,
all the stars hinted
at them
with trembling light.

And on these islands we remain
friendless, like two flowers
in a desert, two lost souls searching
for an eternal loss
in a foreign land.

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